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Is there any significant increase in traffic to the featured-site of any particular day? How large is this effect?

For people unfamiliar with the featured site: it's a graduated site randomly chosen and listed in the sidebar of stackexchange.com. Today it's quantitative finance. I don't think I've ever been to the site. Does it get any significantly more traffic today, or on other days that the site was featured, than it did yesterday or tomorrow?

I suspect the effect is very small, if at all measurable, in particular since the lowest traffic sites, which aren't graduated, are ineligible.

(NB: featured site has nothing to do with featured questions or bounties.)

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  • Bounties are overrated, and ever were.
    – πάντα ῥεῖ
    Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 14:38
  • 8
    @πάνταῥεῖ Featured site has nothing to do with featured questions or bounties.
    – gerrit
    Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 14:40
  • 14
    Given that in more than 4 years this is the first time I hear of featured sites, my guess would be "no" ;-)
    – Massimo Ortolano
    Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 14:51
  • 4
    Probably the next question would be: how many users know/use/are interested in existing features of Stack Exchange homepage? There are: Hot Network Questions (I know some use this), Real-time Questions (some bots use this, but humans?), Today's Featured Site, Top Network Askers, Top Network Sites.
    – Meta Andrew T.
    Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 19:02
  • 14
    I've been using Stack Exchange for nearly 6 years, and I'm a mod on quite a few sites, and this is the first time I have heard of featured sites...
    – Rory Alsop
    Commented Oct 21, 2018 at 20:35
  • I guess we could determine which site was featured on a certain day from the Wayback Machine copies of stackexchange.com, and compare those to the site analytics; unfortunately, that would require a lot of volunteers with 25k/5k on the respective sites.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Apr 9, 2020 at 9:26
  • But my gut feeling says the # of HNQ questions on a certain day matters way more than this single link. Probably even Stack Exchange itself doesn't know this; there's no 'referral' slug in the link in that widget.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Apr 9, 2020 at 9:40
  • While admittedly I am but a grasshopper compared to many of these venerable users, the only reason I ever go to the homepage is when I'm transiting to the list of all sites - I don't think I've ever stopped to look around the page, since I'm there with a very specific purpose (to go somewhere else).
    – FlappingAlong
    Commented Apr 9, 2020 at 11:15

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